


you can't spell anything i talk about

by sunshine_states



Series: apocalypse how [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Mentions of Violence, The Corruption, the author has a lot of feelings about humanity and also symbiotic plant-fungus relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshine_states/pseuds/sunshine_states
Summary: Academia after the end of the world.
Series: apocalypse how [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1570090
Comments: 29
Kudos: 117





	you can't spell anything i talk about

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the excellent Eve L. Ewing poem "what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife."

Anjali has always loved rot. As a girl, she'd wander out into the woods behind her house and turn over stumps just to see the fat white grubs try to squirm away from the sudden light. She picked apart mulch with her bare fingers and stomped on puffball mushrooms until they exploded. She was a year and a half into her master's in mycology when the world ended, and the song she'd been hearing all her life swelled into an operatic roar of noise that, for a time, drowned out everything else.

Only for a time, though. After the third day of curling up under her moldy covers with her hands over her ears, she got used to the music. Or maybe the music got used to her. It felt more like a hangover at this point, really, and she'd handled plenty of those.

"This is weird," she says over lunch with Eden. She taps the worn wood of the picnic bench and it instantly blackens with rot. "This _is_ weird, right?"

Eden keeps coughing up cockroaches. The hissing kind you only really find in the Amazon. She thinks they're living somewhere in her lungs, but she's not totally sure and she's afraid to go in for an x-ray. The last doctor she went to see tried to drop her into the Buried and she is _not about that_. She shrugs.

"Everything is weird now," she says, with a significant glance at the sky. Half the time it's full of fucking eyeballs. The other half, the Vast wins out in whatever obscure war is being waged over their heads, and so today - today it's a clear, menacing blue, like the backdrop of a Renaissance painting if the Renaissance painting could eat you. "I think that's the...least weird? Thing? About all of this? You've always been a huge nerd. Now you're just a huge nerd with superpowers."

"I make things rot," Anjali says. "Pretty sure that's supervillain stuff."

"With great power comes great responsibility," Eden intones, and spits up another bug. "Oh, fuck, that's gross." 

Anjali pets the bug. It hisses.

"That's just the air escaping," Eden says, washing away the bug-taste with a generous swig of orange juice. "It likes you."

"You can tell?"

"Yeah," Eden says cheerfully enough, but she looks a little queasy about it. "I can."

Some people just dissolve into maggots. They're on a university campus, so a lot of students and staff alike gain freaky mind-reading and information-extracting powers, as well as, on occasion, an extra eye or ten. Anjali and Eden spend most of their time indoors, waiting out the packs of Hunters chasing after stragglers on campus, playing endless games of chess while the weird wax people cackle and set fire to things outside. They lock themselves in Ryan Chen's basement with a bunch of their other grad school friends and take Polaroids of each other, just in case. They don't say in case of _what;_ nobody does. But all of them know.

But Anjali loves systems, and Anjali loves patterns, and Anjali begins, quite slowly and by degrees, to notice a change. It's not just that she hasn't turned into a giant cordyceps mushroom by now; it's that Eden hasn't, either. Or, well. Eden hasn't become a writhing mass of cockroaches, is more the point, and Ryan hasn't started yeeting people bodily into the Vast. Eli Gittelman, who was an annoying know-it-all before shit went down, is now just even more of an annoying know-it-all, although he complains that the Watcher has ruined reading for him forever.

"I think it's cool," Ryan says enthusiastically over yet another yay-we-haven't-died-yet celebration dinner. He's grinning in a manic and honestly kind of worrying way; Anjali sees the constellation of Orion reflected in the black void of his irises. But then his smile softens, and he's just Ryan again, Ryan who once fell out of the second floor window of his dorm trying to get a better look at the moon. "Sure, a lot of it sucks. But we can do so much _more_ now."

"Because fear monsters took over the world," Eli says flatly. "Seriously. How do you know that you're not saying exactly what the Vast wants you to say?"

"I don't," Ryan admits. "But that doesn't mean it isn't also _true._ "

"It kind of does, man."

"My mom has a Pomeranian," Ryan says. 

"What's that have to do with -"

"It's, like, this really tiny Pomeranian," Ryan continues. "Bite-sized - you could pretty much lose it in the couch cushions. It has an annoying little bark and it's always tripping us. She named it Bootsie. It wears a pink collar. With _rhinestones._ "

"Okay," Eden interjects, "But -"

"Those used to be wolves, guys," Ryan says. "Those used to be freaking _wolves_."

It's really annoying, Anjali thinks, when Ryan beats her to the punch on an argument. He did it all the time in freshman year. She flicks one of Eden's cockroaches at him in retaliation.

"Hey," Eden says, over his startled shriek. "Be nice to my bugs."

Anjali still hears the song at night. The song of filth, of green-furred fruit and rotting foundations, of insects and black mold creeping across bathroom ceilings and sticky kitchen floors. But now she knows enough to sing back - to tell the frightened monster camping out in her head about morel-hunting expeditions, wound-cleaning maggots, myriad mycorrhizae and the continual renewal of the world. _Mine_ , she tells it, fingers curled into fists and spilling mycelium across across her sheets. _This song is_ mine _now, because_ I _am singing it._


End file.
